The 2013 StarCraft II World Championship Series is a series of events organised by or in cooperation with Blizzard Entertainment. They are designed to include four major StarCraft II broadcasters, ESL, MLG, OGN and GOMTV. There will be a $1.6 Million USD prize pool, that will be spread out among 13 events throughout the year. Those events are split into regions with WCS Europe, WCS America, WCS Korea, and the finals that follow them. There will be three seasons of the regional events, and at the end of each season a global seasonal event. Players will earn points throughout the seasons to qualify for the overall final at BlizzCon 2013.

Regionals events follow closely to the GSL format, separating the tournament into two tiers:

Premier League, also referred to as Code S, contains the top 32 players in the tournament.

Both Ro32 and Ro16 consists of a dual tournament group stage where the top 2 moves on in the tournament and the losers move down to the Challenger League. Players reaching the quarter finals are automatically seeded into the next season Premier League.

Challenger League contains players vying for a spot in the Premier League for the following season.

Challenger League is split into 2 stages:

The first being a single elimination bracket. The Ro40 has the winners of the Challenger League qualifiers and the Premier League Ro32 losers squaring off and the Premier League Ro16 losers fighting for the first 8 spots for Premier League.

The second stage is a dual tournament group stage. It has the last 32 players where the Top 2 moves to Premier League, 3rd place finisher gets seeded into next seasons Challenger League and 4th place will fall out of the league and has to re-qualify for Challenger League.

The vast majority of Korean players and team managers felt that the re-structuring of the GSL prize pool diminished the incentive for players to compete in the Korean league due to the much higher skill level and overall difficulty in qualifying for Code A[1],[2],[3],[4],[5]. This resulted in a lot of high profile players trying their luck in both Europe and North America, something most non-Koreans feared as the tournament isn't region locked.

There was a lot of controversy regarding the organizations selected as the hosts for the regions (MLG for NA and ESL for EU). Many felt that NASL and DreamHack would've been the better choices due to their track record, DreamHack putting on events that always pushes the boundaries of production value and NASL having tremendous amount of experience in holding big scale leagues with qualifiers, group stages and offline event.

The first piece of controversy surrounding MLG came when they announced that the qualifiers required a $18.75 entry fee, something which an immediate outburst from the community quickly got reversed.[6]

The second was the qualifier itself, MLG had scheduled to have the entire qualifier played and cast the noteworthy matches from replays and yet again, the community was quick in voicing their disappointment in no live matches.

The third was about the size of the qualifier. ESL had set up 4 qualifiers with the smallest being held for over a thousand players. MLG decided that a 512 player double elimination bracket was enough, even when a reported 800 players was signed up, resulting in a high amount of players not being able to play, as it was based on who signed up first[7],[8].

The fourth is a result of the previous problems, as we say the 2012 WCS China Nationals winner Comm not being able to play due to the limit. Instead another Chinese player allowed him to play the entire qualifier under his name. Comm managed to fight his way through the qualifier, being a single match away from winning, until MLG decided to disqualify Comm for playing on another account.[9]

The fifth came when it was reported that the player PhysicsLee was a known cheater in the scene. The player managed to knock down CatZ to the lower bracket, before the situation came to light. PhysicsLee was disqualified from the tournament and had his account banned from Battle.Net.[10]

The sixth came when it was reported that Miya who was late to the Challenger League Qualifier for up to 2 hours, got the wrong information from an MLG admin. The ensuing investigation, caused a pause between Moosegills and DeMusliMs final game. The two players decided to play the game to even up the score to 1-1, only to be told that the entire of the top bracket of their group should be played as they decided to put Miya back into the bracket. This prompted Moosegills and DeMusliM to threaten to forfeit the tournament as they felt it was unfair to the players who had waited for several hours. This caused the Axiom owner Genna Bain to take part in the discussion with the admins. After, as she put it, she "unleashed probably the worst BM in my "professional" career,"[11] the different parties came up with the solution of accepting the forfeit loss for Miya in the upper bracket, not to disrupt the rest of the bracket.[12]